A writer must “know and have an ever-present consciousness that this world is a world of fools and rogues… tormented with envy, consumed with vanity; selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions… He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics…” —Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). “The nobility of the writer's occupation lies in resisting oppression, thus in accepting isolation” —Albert Camus (1913-1960). “What are you gonna do” —Bertha Brown (1895-1987).

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

At One 2-Year College, Adjuncts Feel Left Out by Robin Wilson

“Two days a week, Kamran Swanson
arrives at Oakton Community College just before one of the three philosophy
courses he teaches. Between classes, he heads for a windowless office on the
second floor of the campus building, where if he's lucky he can find an open
desk. Oakton provides 25 of them for its hundreds of part-time faculty members.

“After Swanson is finished teaching for
the day and has held his required office hour, he is out the door to catch a
bus home—without ever serving on a faculty committee, attending a department
meeting, or even having a cup of coffee with any of the college's other
professors. If students want extra help, Mr. Swanson usually handles their
questions by e-mail. ‘Without my own desk,’ he says, ‘you never really feel at
home.’

“Swanson acknowledges that it is partly
his own schedule that leaves him little time to do much more at Oakton than
teach. He lives a two-hour commute from the suburban-Chicago campus here and
teaches two classes at another community college downtown. But even adjunct
professors who have worked at Oakton for decades and are inclined to hang
around the campus—which is dotted with 20 outdoor sculptures and a 16-acre
lake—say they feel like outsiders.

“Their lack of connection to full-time
faculty members and to what goes on at the college outside the classroom poses
a crucial problem, they say, not just for them but for the institution and its
10,766 students. After all, the college's 540 part-time instructors outnumber
its 154 full-time professors by more than three to one, teaching 60 percent of
the courses here.

“While administrators at Oakton have
taken several steps to encourage part-time professors to play a bigger role,
and even pay them to attend faculty meetings, most of the college's part-time
instructors either can't make the time or feel they don't really belong…

“Complaints about a lack of connection
are not unique to adjuncts at Oakton. The Chronicle heard the same
lament from several part-time professors in the Chicago area who took a survey
it distributed last spring. ‘In my role as an adjunct,’ one wrote in an
anonymous comment, ‘I have very little contact with regular faculty, or even
other adjuncts, so I feel very marginal to the educational process of the
school.’

“Part of that feeling is built into the
job: Adjuncts are paid to teach, and many work at several institutions, which
leaves them little time or inclination to get very involved at any of them. But
that poses an increasing problem as part-time adjuncts now make up about 50
percent of the professoriate nationwide. That means that half of the nation's
college instructors may not feel much of a connection to the campuses where
they teach.

“By adjunct standards, Oakton is actually
one of the better colleges in the Chicago area to work for. It has the state's
oldest union for part-time instructors and pays them a competitive rate—between
$2,475 and $3,540 for each three-credit course [in 2009]. The college is known
for giving adjuncts freedom to teach the way they see fit, and it isn't
reluctant to back up instructors if students challenge a grade. It also
encourages, and often pays, adjuncts to get involved outside the classroom.

“Margaret B. Lee, the college's
president, was once an adjunct instructor herself. She taught English at Alpena
Community College, in Michigan, during the mid-1970s, while she finished up her
dissertation at the University of Chicago and worked on a pig farm with her
husband. ‘I have an innate sympathy in my heart for those people who get called
a day before class starts and get sent the syllabus in the mail, and there's no
other contact throughout the semester with anyone until you're told, turn in
your grades,’ she says. When Lee was an adjunct, she recalls, ‘I could say,
nobody knew my name.’

“…Part of the gulf between full- and
part-time faculty members here is financial. Full-time faculty members at
Oakton teach five courses a semester and earn an average of $86,000 a year
[2009]. Adjuncts, who can teach up to three classes each semester (a new
contract will allow them to teach four), earn a maximum of about $21,000 during
the academic year. Like other colleges, Oakton does not provide adjuncts with
subsidized health insurance. And full-time professors can qualify for up to
$1,000 a year in travel expenses for scholarly conferences; adjuncts usually
get only as much as $100…

“The gap in pay and benefits feels
particularly unfair to adjuncts at Oakton because, unlike at many four-year
institutions, the credentials of full- and part-time instructors here are not
much different. Nearly as many adjuncts as full-timers hold Ph.D.'s: 18 percent
compared to 22 percent. And all but one of the full-timers here are tenured or
on the tenure track, while many adjuncts don't know from semester to semester
how many courses they will be teaching…”

2 comments:

If I'm not mistaken, the original idea of adjuncts was for the occasional odd class that might be best taught by a working professional in the field. Som of the lawyers at the firm I work at teach 3rd year law classes, for instance. The structure of the adjunct position works quite well for those situation. A professional working in the field doesn't need a high salary or benefits - they get that from their day job; they just a bit to cover their time and expenses. They're not really supposed to be part of the college/university - the fact that they are outsiders with a different perspective is supposed to be a plus. Being limited to a one or two classes per term isn't a problem because they don't have more time than that anyway.

The problem came when some geniuses (the same geniuses that thought TFA was a good idea, probably) decided to save money by staffing large numbers of college teaching positions this way. Now you have a whole cadre of barely paid, disconnected instructors with little sense of the big picture of the education the college/university is trying to provide its students (for that matter, I'm not sure colleges/universities generally have such visions any more, just visions of $$$). Yet another field that has been deprofessionalized for profit.

Teacher/Poet/Musician

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Persona

"I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradiction and nonsense" —Albert Camus (1913-1960).